“Worse than I can describe, I do assure you. I doubt not we of the turncoat legion assign all sorts of reasons for our forsaking of the cause, but I am telling you the bald truth—as I shall tell Sir Henry. We are hungry, and an empty stomach knows neither king nor Congress.”
But my young lieutenant laughed in a most friendly way and shook his head at this.
“You are carrying it off as a brave man should, Mr. Page, and making a jest of it. But you are like a good many of the others; a true Loyalist at heart, with only the eleventh-hour determination to turn your back upon whatever influences swung you first in the wrong direction. Confess, now; are there not many others in the same case, and lacking only the eleventh-hour courage to come over?”
I said there were, doubtless—and hoped most fervently that it was the lie I firmly believed it to be. Then, after I had answered freely all his questions about our camp at Tappan—with more and more ingenious lies, you may be sure—I ventured upon the ground of my own perilous debate.
“There have been rumors in the Highlands of Mr. Arnold’s raising of a regiment of his own here in New York. Is that so, Mr. Castner?” I asked guardedly.
The lieutenant nodded, and there was a graver look in his eyes when he asked, in turn, “Do you know Mr. Arnold, Captain Page?”
“I haven’t that honor, as yet,” I replied. “My short service in the Continental Line has been in the horse; and he, as you know, has been lately in garrison at West Point.”
He bowed thoughtfully. “A strange man, Mr. Page; and growing stranger to all of us, I think, as the days pass. He has not come over to us for any overmastering love of the king or the king’s cause, I fear.”
“No?” said I.
“It is little likely. If I read him aright, he is burned and seared through and through with his own ambition.”